Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison

Birth Date

Feb 11, 1847. American inventive genius and holder of more than 1,200 patents (including the incandescent electric lamp, phonograph, electric dynamo and key parts of many now-familiar devices such as the movie camera, telephone transmitter, etc). Edison said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” His birthday is now widely observed as Inventor’s Day. Born at Milan, OH, and died at Menlo Park, NJ, Oct 18, 1931.

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Thomas Alva Edison

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Thomas Alva Edison demonstrating his tinfoil phonograph, photograph by Mathew Brady, 1878. (credit: Courtesy of the Edison National Historical Site, West Orange, N.J.)

(born Feb. 11, 1847, Milan, Ohio, U.S.died Oct. 18, 1931, West Orange, N.J.) U.S. inventor. He had very little formal schooling. He set up a laboratory in his father's basement at age 10; at 12 he was earning money selling newspapers and candy on trains. He worked as a telegrapher (186268) before deciding to pursue invention and entrepreneurship. Throughout much of his career, he was strongly motivated by efforts to overcome his handicap of partial deafness. For Western Union he developed a machine capable of sending four telegraph messages down one wire, only to sell the invention to Western Union's rival, Jay Gould, for more than $100,000. He created the world's first industrial-research laboratory, in Menlo Park, N.J. There he invented the carbon-button transmitter (1877), still used in telephone speakers and microphones today; the phonograph (1877); and the incandescent lightbulb (1879). To develop the lightbulb, he was advanced $30,000 by such financiers as J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts. In 1882 he supervised the installation of the world's first permanent commercial central power system, in lower Manhattan. After the death of his first wife (1884), he built a new laboratory in West Orange, N.J. Its first major endeavour was the commercialization of the phonograph, which Alexander Graham Bell had improved on since Edison's initial invention. At the new laboratory Edison and his team also developed an early movie camera and an instrument for viewing moving pictures; they also developed the alkaline storage battery. Although his later projects were not as successful as his earlier ones, Edison continued to work even in his 80s. Singly or jointly, he held a world-record 1,093 patents, nearly 400 of them for electric light and power. He always invented for necessity, with the object of devising something new that he could manufacture. More than any other, he laid the basis for the technological revolution of the modern electric world.

For more information on Thomas Alva Edison, visit Britannica.com.

Houghton Mifflin Guide to Science & Technology:

Thomas Alva Edison

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Thomas Alva Edison

Library of Congress

[b. Milan, Ohio, February 11, 1847, d. West Orange, New Jersey, October 18, 1931]

Edison was the most prolific inventor of all time, receiving 1093 patents in the United States alone and laying the groundwork for many technological innovations of the 20th century. His major inventions include the phonograph, introducing the idea of recording sound, and an incandescent lamp that had a carbon filament sealed in a glass globe containing a partial vacuum. Edison also planned the first electricity distribution system--with dynamos, insulated underground cables, meters for measuring consumption, outlets, and switches--to carry electricity to houses. In addition, Edison patented the first machine to produce motion pictures. Yet another major invention, the nickel-alkaline storage battery with lithium, came in 1908. Edison also discovered that heat causes an electric current to flow between his lamp's filament and a separate electrode inside the lamp--the Edison effect.

Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: Technology:

Thomas Edison

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Edison, Thomas A.

An American inventor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He patented more than a thousand devices, including the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb.

• Edison originated the proverb “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” • Edison was called the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” after his home town in New Jersey.

Houghton Mifflin Guide to Science & Technology:

America's greatest inventor

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Thomas Alva Edison is the most successful and well-known inventor of all time, with more than a thousand patents to his name. His best-known inventions are the incandescent lamp, the phonograph, and motion pictures, but he also contributed inventions for telegraph systems.

Others also invented some of the devices we associate with Edison, but he often made them better and he got people to use them. His success began with hard work; for example, he performed thousands of experiments to find a suitable filament that would resist the intense heat that results when producing light.

Another factor that made Edison a successful inventor was a keen interest in anything mechanical. As a teenager he worked as a telegraph operator and was repeatedly fired because of his constant tampering with the equipment.

Edison's success is often attributed to his business sense, but this is open to question. His first major patent, a vote recorder for Congress, did not rouse interest--one congressman told Edison that legislators wanted to keep voting records vague. Edison then vowed to make only inventions for which there was demand. Although correct about the electric light, his efforts with electric automobiles were superseded by the internal combustion engine. His list of possible applications for his phonograph included a dictating machine for letter writing, spoken books, teaching of speech, reproduction of music, archiving of voices of famous people, music boxes and toys, speaking clocks, study of language, educational recordings, and transmission of recorded messages over the telephone. Not only is recording of music halfway down the list, but initially Edison resisted even the idea. Possibly, his partial deafness was a factor in his failure to recognize the importance of recorded music; in any case, all of his other ideas have come to pass, although nearly always using magnetic tape (or, more recently, digital and laser) technology instead of his purely mechanical method.

There are other examples of Edison's inability to foresee the uses to which his inventions might be put. He fought against projection for motion pictures, and believed that more money was to be made on peep shows than in movie houses. Consequently, although Edison showed that motion pictures were possible and made some of the early films, credit for the cinema outside of the United States is usually granted to the Lumière brothers of France, who projected motion pictures for small audiences from the first.

Where Edison's business acumen was more evident was in the development of manufacturing and distribution related to his inventions. The electric generator had been available for decades when Edison opened the first power plants in London and New York City. He correctly recognized that his light bulbs would be of no use unless electric power was available and that money was to be made not only by selling the bulbs, but also by supplying the electricity.

Edison was not much interested in science for its own sake. In 1883 he discovered the basic principle of the vacuum tube (or valve), still known as the Edison effect, but he paid no attention to something for which he failed to see a use.

Oxford Companion to US Military History:

Thomas Alva Edison

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(1847–1931), prolific inventor, entrepreneur, and industrialist

A pioneer in team industrial research, Edison made significant innovations in communications technologies (telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and motion pictures) and in electric lighting and electric power systems.

Edison's laboratories in New Jersey and his worldwide acclaim as a successful inventor reinforced an aura of American industrial progress through research that fostered application of systemized research to military technology in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1915, naval secretary Josephus Daniels enlisted Edison to organize and chair a Naval Consulting Board to provide technical counsel to the navy. Edison lent his name to board activities, personally engaged in sonic research for detection of submarines, and vigorously promoted creation of a Naval Research Laboratory. His group was outflanked, however, by the National Academy of Science, representing younger, academically oriented scientists. They created a presidentially appointed National Research Council, led by the politically astute George Ellery Hale, which attained a power and influence that eclipsed the Edison group and ultimately led in World War II to establishment of Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development. Nevertheless, some of the Edison's companies were organized into the General Electric Company, which became a major defense contractor.

Bibliography

Reese V. Jenkins, et al., eds., Papers of Thomas Edison, 1989–.
Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, 1998

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Thomas Alva Edison

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The American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) held hundreds of patents, most for electrical devices and electric light and power. Although the phonograph and incandescent lamp are best known, perhaps his greatest invention was organized research.

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on Feb. 11, 1847; his father was a jack-of-all-trades, his mother a former teacher. Edison spent 3 months in school, then was taught by his mother. At the age of 12 he sold fruit, candy, and papers on the Grand Trunk Railroad. In 1862, using his small handpress in a baggage car, he wrote and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which was circulated to 400 railroad employees. That year he became a telegraph operator, taught by the father of a child whose life Edison had saved. Exempt from military service because of deafness, he was a tramp telegrapher until he joined Western Union Telegraph Company in Boston in 1868.

Early Inventions

Probably Edison's first invention was an automatic telegraph repeater (1864). His first patent was for an electric vote recorder. In 1869, as a partner in a New York electrical firm, he perfected the stock ticker and sold it. This money, in addition to that from his share of the partnership, provided funds for his own factory in Newark, N.J. Edison hired technicians to collaborate on inventions; he wanted an "invention factory." As many as 80 "earnest men," including chemists, physicists, and mathematicians, were on his staff. "Invention to order" became very profitable.

From 1870 to 1875 Edison invented many telegraphic improvements: transmitters; receivers; the duplex, quadruplex, and sextuplex systems; and automatic printers and tape. He worked with Christopher Sholes, "father of the typewriter," in 1871 to improve the typing machine. Edison claimed he made 12 typewriters at Newark about 1870. The Remington Company bought his interests.

In 1876 Edison's carbon telegraph transmitter for Western Union marked a real advance toward making the Bell telephone practical. (Later, Émile Berliner's transmitter was granted patent priority by the courts.) With the money Edison received from Western Union for his transmitter, he established a factory in Menlo Park, N.J. Again he pooled scientific talent, and within 6 years he had more than 300 patents. The electric pen (1877) produced stencils to make copies. (The A. B. Dick Company licensed Edison's patent and manufactured the mimeograph machine.)

The Phonograph

Edison's most original and lucrative invention, the phonograph, was patented in 1877. From a manually operated instrument making impressions on metal foil and replaying sounds, it became a motor-driven machine playing cylindrical wax records by 1887. By 1890 he had more than 80 patents on it. The Victor Company developed from his patents. (Alexander Graham Bell impressed sound tracks on cylindrical shellac records; Berliner invented disk records. Edison's later dictating machine, the Ediphone, used disks.)

Incandescent Lamp

To research incandescence, Edison and others, including J. P. Morgan, organized the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878. (Later it became the General Electric Company.) Edison made the first practical incandescent lamp in 1879, and it was patented the following year. After months of testing metal filaments, Edison and his staff examined 6,000 organic fibers from around the world and decided that Japanese bamboo was best. Mass production soon made the lamps, although low-priced, profitable.

First Central Electric-Light Power Plant

Prior to Edison's central power station, each user of electricity needed a dynamo (generator), which was inconvenient and expensive. Edison opened the first commercial electric station in London in 1882; in September the Pearl Street Station in New York City marked the beginning of America's electrical age. Within 4 months the station was lighting more than 5,000 lamps for 230 customers, and the demand for lamps exceeded supply. By 1890 it supplied current to 20,000 lamps, mainly in office buildings, and to motors, fans, printing presses, and heating appliances. Many towns and cities installed central stations.

Increased use of electricity led to Edison-base sockets, junction boxes, safety fuses, underground conduits, meters, and the three-wire system. Jumbo dynamos, with drum-wound armatures, could maintain 110 volts with 90 percent efficiency. The three-wire system, first installed in Sunbury, Pa., in 1883, superseded the parallel circuit, used 110 volts, and necessitated high-resistance lamp filaments (metal alloys were later used).

In 1883 Edison made a significant discovery in pure science, the Edison effect - electrons flowed from incandescent filaments. With a metal-plate insert, the lamp could serve as a valve, admitting only negative electricity. Although "etheric force" had been recognized in 1875 and the Edison effect was patented in 1883, the phenomenon was little known outside the Edison laboratory. (At this time existence of electrons was not generally accepted.) This "force" underlies radio broadcasting, long-distance telephony, sound pictures, television, electric eyes, x-rays, high-frequency surgery, and electronic musical instruments. In 1885 Edison patented a method to transmit telegraphic "aerial" signals, which worked over short distances, and later sold this "wireless" patent to Guglielmo Marconi.

Creating the Modern Research Laboratory

The vast West Orange, N.J., factory, which Edison directed from 1887 to 1931, was the world's most complete research laboratory, an antecedent of modern research and development laboratories, with teams of workers systematically investigating problems. Various inventions included a method to make plate glass, a magnetic ore separator, compressing dies, composition brick, a cement process, an all-concrete house, an electric locomotive (patented 1893), a fluoroscope, a nickel-iron battery, and motion pictures. Edison refused to patent the fluoroscope, so that doctors could use it freely; but he patented the first fluorescent lamp in 1896.

The Edison battery, finally perfected in 1910, was a superior storage battery with an alkaline electrolyte. After 8000 trials Edison remarked, "Well, at least we know 8000 things that don't work." In 1902 he improved the copper oxide battery, which resembled modern dry cells.

Edison's motion picture camera, the kinetograph, could photograph action on 50-foot strips of film, 16 images per foot. A young assistant, in order to make the first Edison movies, in 1893 built a small laboratory called the "Black Maria," - a shed, painted black inside and out, that revolved on a base to follow the sun and kept the actors illuminated. The kinetoscope projector of 1893 showed the films. The first commercial movie theater, a peepshow, opened in New York in 1884. A coin put into a slot activated the kinetoscope inside the box. Acquiring and improving the projector of Thomas Armat in 1895, Edison marketed it as the Vitascope.

Movie Production

The Edison Company produced over 1,700 movies. Synchronizing movies with the phonograph in 1904, Edison laid the basis for talking pictures. In 1908 his cinemaphone appeared, adjusting film speed to phonograph speed. In 1913 his kinetophone projected talking pictures: the phonograph, behind the screen, was synchronized by ropes and pulleys with the projector. Edison produced several "talkies."

Meanwhile, among other inventions, the universal motor, which used alternating or direct current, appeared in 1907; and the electric safety lantern, patented in 1914, greatly reduced casualties among miners. That year Edison invented the telescribe, which combined features of the telephone and dictating phonograph.

Work for the Government

During World War I Edison headed the U.S. Navy Consulting Board and contributed 45 inventions, including substitutes for previously imported chemicals (especially carbolic acid, or phenol), defensive instruments against U-boats, a ship-telephone system, an underwater searchlight, smoke screen machines, antitorpedo nets, turbine projectile heads, collision mats, navigating equipment, and methods of aiming and firing naval guns. After the war he established the Naval Research Laboratory, the only American institution for organized weapons research until World War II.

Synthetic Rubber

With Henry Ford and the Firestone Company, Edison organized the Edison Botanic Research Company in 1927 to discover or develop a domestic source of rubber. Some 17,000 different botanical specimens were examined over 4 years - an indication of Edison's tenaciousness. By crossbreeding goldenrod, he developed a strain yielding 12 percent latex, and in 1930 he received his last patent, for this process.

The Man Himself

To raise money, Edison dramatized himself by careless dress, clowning for reporters, and playing the role of homespun sage with aphorisms like "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration" and "Discovery is not invention." He scoffed at formal education, thought 4 hours' sleep a night enough, and often worked 40 or 50 hours straight. As a world symbol of Yankee ingenuity, he looked and acted the part. George Bernard Shaw, briefly an Edison employee in 1879, put an Edisontype hero into his novel The Irrational Knot: free-souled, sensitive, cheerful, and profane.

Edison had more than 10,000 books at home and masses of printed materials at the laboratory. When launching a new project, he wished to avoid others' mistakes and to know everything about a subject. Some 25,000 notebooks contained his research records, ideas, hunches, and mistakes. Supposedly, his great shortcoming was lack of interest in anything not utilitarian; yet he loved to read Shakespeare and Thomas Paine.

Edison died in West Orange, N.J., on Oct. 18, 1931. The laboratory buildings and equipment associated with his career are preserved in Greenfield Village, Detroit, Mich., thanks to Henry Ford's interest and friendship.

Edison, Thomas A.

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(1847-1931), inventor. Thomas Edison made a lasting mark on the daily lives of Americans by what he did and on their minds by the way he did it. From his boyhood he exemplified what they liked to believe about their society and destiny. His small-town birthplace, Milan, Ohio, was bypassed by the railroad and fell into decline, his family's fortunes with it. As a boy Edison lost much of his hearing, and his formal schooling was fragmentary. Yet he surmounted those handicaps in the Horatio Alger hero's mode of pluck and luck, peddling candy and newspapers to railroad passengers, and prefigured another hero of boys' novels, Tom Swift, by setting up a small lab for electrical experiments in a baggage car. Chance thus endowed him with the makings of a surefire myth, the equivalent of Lincoln's log cabin remodeled for the new age of exuberant technology.

Electricity, which in that day chiefly meant telegraphy, had long fascinated Edison, and his frequenting of railroad stations prompted him to make telegraphy his calling, since the range of his hearing encompassed the chatter of the instruments. Journeymen telegraphers were given to wandering, and young Edison's irrepressible tinkering, together with his taste for unnerving practical jokes, hurried him along from job to job. Thus in 1868 he arrived in Boston, the de facto capital of American science and technology, where he turned full-time inventor. The electrical shop of Charles Williams, which catered to inventors, gave him, as it did Alexander Graham Bell soon after, the facilities and skilled workmen needed to put ideas into practice. But unlike Bell, Edison in 1869 saw still greater financial opportunity in New York. There and in New Jersey over the next twenty years he astonished the world with a series of epoch-making inventions unequaled by any one individual before or since, notably his quadruplex telegraph, carbon-button telephone transmitter, phonograph, electric light, and system of electrical generation and distribution. Ultimately more than a thousand patents bore his name (though not all were primarily of his creation).

As notable a concept as any was the "invention factory" he created in the pastoral setting of Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. Owing something perhaps to the Williams shop, it was a pioneering, independent, self-sustaining research and development center. Staffed with brilliant technicians and trained theoretical scientists, the Menlo Park establishment was too narrowly profit-oriented to be classed with the twentieth-century research labs of corporate giants like American Telephone & Telegraph and General Electric, with their quasi-academic ambience. On the other hand, Menlo Park, unbeholden to any established industry, was not inhibited from calling whole new industries into being. Edison was hailed as "the Wizard of Menlo Park."

Edison, however, yielded to the temptation of organizing and directing some of the new enterprises. Clumsier in entrepreneurship than in invention, distracted by the demands of management, and his inventive genius ebbing with age, Edison produced no breathtakingly fundamental inventions after the 1880s (although his team did much to develop motion pictures). Still, his persona did not fade with his performance. More than half a century after his death, his image remains incandescent in the public's memory, and his work stands as a bridge between the era of the independent inventor and that of corporate, government, and academic research and development.

Bibliography:

Matthew Josephson, Edison (1959); Wyn Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (1981).

Author:

Robert V. Bruce

See also Science and Technology.

Answer of the Day:

Thomas Edison

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Thomas Alva Edison

Where would our spotlight be without Thomas Edison? Born on this date in 1847, the "Wizard of Menlo Park" received over 1,000 patents for things we consider indispensable today, such as the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the gramophone, and the stock ticker. He created the first motion picture camera and the first copyrighted film, Fred Ott's Sneeze. Edison was hearing impaired from when he was young and had only three months of formal schooling. But, lucky for us, he sure loved to tinker.

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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, February 11, 2006

Columbia Encyclopedia:

Thomas Alva Edison

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Edison, Thomas Alva, 1847-1931, American inventor, b. Milan, Ohio. A genius in the practical application of scientific principles, Edison was one of the greatest and most productive inventors of his time, but his formal schooling was limited to three months in Port Huron, Mich., in 1854. For several years he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk RR, and it was during this period that he began to suffer from deafness, which was to increase throughout his life. He later worked as a telegraph operator in various cities.

Edison's first inventions were the transmitter and receiver for the automatic telegraph, the quadruplex system of transmitting four simultaneous messages, and an improved stock-ticker system. In 1877 he invented the carbon telephone transmitter (see microphone) for the Western Union Telegraph Company. His phonograph (patented 1878) was notable as the first successful instrument of its kind.

In 1879, Edison created the first commercially practical incandescent lamp (with a carbon filament). For use with it he developed a complete electrical distribution system for light and power, including generators, motors, light sockets with the Edison base, junction boxes, safety fuses, underground conductors, and other devices. The crowning achievement of his work in this field was the Pearl St. plant (1881-82) in New York City, the first permanent central electric-light power plant in the world. He also built and operated (1880) an experimental electric railroad, and produced a superior storage battery of iron and nickel with an alkaline electrolyte.

Other significant inventions include the Kinetoscope, or peep-show machine. Edison later demonstrated experimentally the synchronization of motion pictures and sound, and talking pictures were based on this work. During World War I he helped to develop the manufacture in the United States of chemicals previously imported; he also served as head of the U.S. navy consulting board concerned with ship defenses against torpedoes and mines. Edison later worked on the production of rubber from American plants, notably goldenrod.

Edison held over 1,300 U.S. and foreign patents, and his workshops at Menlo Park (1876) and West Orange, N.J. (1887), were significant as forerunners of the modern industrial research laboratory in which teams of workers, rather than a lone inventor, systematically investigate a given subject. An Edison memorial tower and light was erected (1938) in Menlo Park, N.J.; Edison's laboratory and other buildings associated with his career are preserved or replicated in Greenfield Village. Some of his various companies were consolidated to form the General Electric Company (GE).

Bibliography

See the autobiographical Diary and Sundry Observations (ed. by D. D. Runes, 1948, repr. 1968); his papers, ed. by R. V. Jenkins et al. (6 vol., 1989-); biography by R. Silverberg (1967); W. Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (1981); R. Friedel and P. Israel, Edison's Electric Light: The Art of Invention (2010).

Quotes By:

Thomas A. Edison

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Quotes:

"Discontent is the first necessity of progress."

"I start where the last man left off."

"There's a way to do better... find it."

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless."

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."

"I have not failed. I've just found 10, 000 ways that won't work."

See more famous quotes by Thomas A. Edison

AMG AllMovie Guide:

Thomas Alva Edison

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Biography

Thomas Alva Edison was one of the world's great inventors, and it is a small wonder that he was hailed as the Wizard of Menlo Park by his contemporaries. Edison was responsible for creating the stock ticker, the first copy machines, the incandescent light bulb, the carbon transmitter/microphone (which made Alexander Bell's telephone viable), and the phonograph. He also oversaw the development of the first devices for filming and exhibiting motion pictures. His movies had their genesis in his enormous West Orange, NJ, laboratory when he came up with the idea of recording moving pictures much in the way that his phonograph recorded live sounds. The invention, called the Edison Kinetophongraph or Kinetophone, was actually developed by Edison's assistant, W.K.L. Dickson in 1889. Dickson based his design on the European Zoetrope, a hand-turned cylinder covered with photographic images on glass plates. The first kinetophonograph used strips of celluloid film invented by John Carbutt, but later employed Eastman's innovative 35 mm celluloid film stock, which came on long rolls. Synchronized with a phonograph, the invention projected pictures. This invention later inspired Edison to assign Dickson to create the first electrically operated Kinetograph camera; with it, in late 1890, he made the first film, Monkeyshines, a brief antic that featured Edison employee Fred Ott. Though Dickson envisioned that these motion pictures would be projected upon a large screen, Edison wanted to promote an individualized viewing system and assigned Dickson to engineer the Kinetoscope. It became a popular attraction, and soon entire parlors, called nickelodeons, became all the rage. There, viewers would pay a nickel and stand before a cabinet to watch an exciting film that lasted 60-90 seconds. The first nickelodeon opened in New York in the spring of 1894. To make these films, Edison and Dickson created the world's first movie studio, Black Maria.

Dickson eventually left Edison to found his own film company -- which eventually became Biograph -- and to perfect his Mutograph camera and projector. Dickson became Edison's first real competitor when Edison failed to patent his movie-making inventions and refused to develop a large-screen projection devise, believing it would never make money. Edison's tune abruptly changed when he learned that, in 1894, France's Lumière Brothers had stolen his ideas and those of others to develop their Cinematographe, a camera and projection device. The following year, they showed the first public films, which caught on like wild fire. Always the capitalist, Edison immediately initiated a lawsuit to insure that he was given total credit for the film invention. The suit lasted many years, but in 1909, he succeeded in helping launch the Motion Picture Patents Company to regulate the number of independent producers in the burgeoning film industry.

In 1895, eager to catch up to the Lumières, Edison teamed up with Thomas Armat, the man behind the Vitascope system, and, in the spring of 1896, they exhibited the first big-screen film in New York. Edison's company kept producing films at his Black Maria studio through 1907, before moving his filmmaking operation to an enormous, all-glass studio in the Bronx, New York. In 1917, the monopoly created by the Motion Picture Patents Company was destroyed. Shortly thereafter, Edison retired from making films. He died in 1931. In 1940, MGM created a pair of biopics to pay tribute to the great inventor: Young Tom Edison, starring Mickey Rooney, and Edison, The Man, featuring Spencer Tracy in the title role. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

AMG AllMusic Guide: Pop Artists:

Thomas Alva Edison

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Genres: Spoken Word

Biography

Thomas A. Edison was not a musical artist. Edison was also partly deaf, owing to an accident suffered in childhood when he attempted to hop aboard a train. But Edison deserves inclusion as part of the All Music Guide, as he invented the very medium we primarily use to transmit music -- sound recording.

In the summer of 1877, Edison was looking into ways to develop a device that would compete with the telephone just patented by his arch rival, Alexander Graham Bell. Working with ticker tape, a vibrating stylus, and the membrane from Bell's phone, Edison was looking for an alternate way to communicate over telegraph lines. Whatever he was attempting at this point didn't work out, but he later recalled that he was distracted by the musical sounds that the indented tape made as it passed through a spring, resembling the sound of speech. Edison also noted that the indentations made in the ticker tape by the wagging stylus left a trace of vibration that followed a recognizable pattern.

How Edison got from that to the phonograph is unclear. Conventional wisdom asserts that by August 13, 1877 Edison submitted a sketch of the first phonograph to machinist John Kreusi, who completed building the first model in about a month's time. The hasty Edison sketch often reproduced as the "first phonograph design" is probably not the one that Edison really used; that was likely mislaid, and a later sketch was drawn up quickly in order to protect Edison's patents.

Edison unveiled the phonograph to reporters from Scientific American in the spring of 1878, and thereafter coordinated a tour in cities across the country, where either Edison himself or his employees led demonstrations of the phonograph's capabilities in local lecture halls. Edison would later claim that for the first words spoken into the phonograph he utilized "a little piece of practical poetry: Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow." Audience members at these assemblies shouted obscenities into the phonograph, hoping to "trick" it, but it merely played back all the obscenities, recitations, cornet solos, and anything else that was thrown into its little mouthpiece. The American public was astounded!

The first phonograph, which was merely a hand-cranked, grooved cylinder mandrel covered with a thin sheet of tinfoil, was surprisingly versatile despite its simplicity -- it could be played backwards, and was capable of primitive overdubs. However it had one major drawback; the recordings it made weren't permanent. Once the tinfoil wore out, generally after about five plays, or the tinfoil sheet was removed from the mandrel, the recording made was effectively destroyed. Edison had hoped to market the phonograph as an office dictation device, but for it to be truly practical for that purpose Edison's cylinder would have to be able to play the recording many more times. After the novelty of the phonograph wore off in early 1879, Edison found no backers for further development. So he went back to the drawing board in hopes of finding a "better idea," and later in the year, invented the incandescent light.

Exploiting this new invention kept Edison quite busy for a longtime, and a period of some five years passed where there were no new developments in regard to the phonograph. But in 1884, Alexander Graham Bell's nephew, Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter began to work in secret on an improved phonograph, which used wax cylinders in place of the tinfoil. The cylinders could be removed from the phonograph without being damaged and held their recordings intact for a hundred plays or more. Bell and Tainter apprised Edison of their discoveries and offered to pool their patents with his to expedite exploitation of the new phonograph. But an angry Edison would hear nothing of it, and early in 1888 he and his top engineers conducted several sleepless days and nights of investigation into improving Edison's "favorite invention." A battery was added to power the motor and other improvements were made. Beginning in the summer of 1888, Edison sent his men to Europe on a quest to collect testimonial recordings of the most distinguished figures from abroad. Handel's music was recorded at the Crystal Palace in London, as were the voices of Queen Victoria and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. The piano playing of composer Johannes Brahms was recorded in Berlin. Edison also collected testimonials from men in the State Department in Washington, D.C., who were using the phonograph on an experimental basis to transcribe Senate hearings on a scandal involving the New York Port Authority.

All of these achievements helped greatly to enhance the prestige of the lowly phonograph, but the business side of the operation still moved at a snail's pace. Jesse Lippincott, a wealthy financier known to Edison, secured Bell and Tainter's patents in 1888, and afterward a stubborn Edison finally relented to go in with Lippincott. In the spring of 1889, The North American Phonograph Company was established, and the American recording industry was finally born, nearly twelve years after the device had first appeared in Edison's lab!

In 1890, you couldn't just go out to one of Edison's North American branch offices and buy a phonograph, unless you were a corporate executive seeking one for use in dictation. Very early phonographs intended for public entertainment were coin operated and initially set up in dancehalls and drinking establishments as an amusement. Damage to equipment and frequent service calls proved costly, and as a result Cincinnati-based Edison jobber James Andem devised the idea of installing the machines in an arcade that would be manned by a full-time staff. The first such arcade opened in Cleveland in September 1890, and proved quite profitable. Most other regional Edison offices followed suit in short order.

Although Edison didn't know it, the elements that led to his fall from dominance in the recording industry were already underway from the very start of his involvement in it. In 1889 or 1890, inventor Emile Berliner began to develop a flat-disc type record. Ironically his first recorded selection would be "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," demonstrating that Berliner's taste in "practical poetry" was similar to Edison's own! Berliner's flat disc record was five inches in diameter (the same size as today's compact disc), played for just under two minutes, and made its modest bow in the Washington, D.C., area in 1895.

At this time Edison began to experience trouble from breakaway regional divisions, most potently from the Maryland-Delaware-Washington, D.C., subsidiary, which declared itself independent and renamed itself The Columbia Phonograph Company in 1896. Edison sued Columbia, but somehow the company managed to survive. This set up a domino effect within North American that caused it to collapse by 1898. The arcade business was falling off anyway, and Edison was forced to shift his focus to marketing phonographs for home use. He could not do so cheaply, and Edison refused to compromise in terms of both the quality of his phonographs and their cost. So it was easy to undercut his business, and infringers were legion. One by one Edison took them to court, and he usually won.

But try as he might, Edison could not win an infringement suit against manufacturers of flat disc records. Berliner's invention was received with indifference in America upon its first launch, as it was little more than a toy and put out such poor sound. But in Europe, where there was practically no phonograph industry and, most significantly, Edison himself had no interests, the flat disc format was a runaway success. Flat disc records didn't sound as good as cylinders, but they were easier to store and the machines that played them were much cheaper than Edison's. By 1901, both Victor and Columbia were establishing the flat disc business in the United States, and over time, the sound of the records would improve.

Edison finally began to market a cheap Edison portable player, the "Little Gem" around 1909. He also introduced a cylinder that played for four minutes, longer than the average flat disc record of the time.

Finally, in 1912, Edison introduced "Diamond Discs," his own answer to the flat disc phenomenon. These records were "vertical cut," meaning that the grooves wagged toward and away from you, like on a cylinder, rather than from right to left, as in standard "lateral cut" recordings. The records were also injection molded, rather than "pressed" like other records. The grooves were molded into a thin Bakelite surface that was spread over a thick blank made from a mixture of china clay and wood flour. This use of Bakelite may have been the very first time plastics were utilized in American industry, and certainly it was the first time plastic was used in the production of records. Before, Edison had depended on his employees to make the selection as what to record and by whom. But now Edison himself personally listened to and approved all of his Diamond Discs. It was a pet project, to say the least. As in the case of his cylinder boxes, all Edison Diamond Discs bore his likeness and signature.

Edison really tried to reach out to the public through the Diamond Discs, to the point of giving away copies of ten of his favorite records with every machine sold. However, the public wasn't crazy about the fact that you couldn't play Edison records on other types of phonographs. While the sound on Diamond Discs was noticeably superior to that of the lateral records made by Victor and Columbia, it was also much quieter, and once the record got a little worn and the needle started playing that china clay and wood flour blank, they didn't sound that good! Alas, Edison records were heavy enough to kill a small animal if dropped on one, and their thickness made them difficult to store, just like cylinders. Diamond Discs didn't bear paper labels until about 1920, and the label information was simply etched into the black surface of the record, making it difficult to distinguish one Diamond Disc from another.

Ultimately it was Edison's micro-management of the recorded repertoire on Diamond Discs that ultimately sealed their fate. He insisted on hiring artists based on their talent and clear enunciation of lyrics, rather than their reputation with the public. With a few very significant exceptions, such as in the case of Edison records made by Sophie Tucker, Serge Rachmaninov, and Polk Miller's Old South Quartette, relatively few of the performers who recorded for Edison were known other than from the records they made. His own musical tastes were those of a man born before the civil war, and these were most decidedly out of step with a record buying public with a growing interest in ragtime, and later jazz, which Edison himself couldn't stand. Likewise he didn't care much for many of the "name" artists he recorded, referring to Rachmaninov as a "pounder."

The Edison Recording firm continued to struggle, producing Diamond Discs, cylinders, and machines, through practically the whole of the 1920s. Edison did eventually relinquish his control of what the company recorded on Diamond Disc, and the Edison Company from about 1920 forward recorded a fair amount of good jazz by artists, such as the California Ramblers and bandleader Dave Kaplan. Edison also issued the first bona fide commercial country record in 1924 when his in house tenor of longstanding Vernon Dalhart recorded "The Wreck of the Old 97." However, the Edison Company was now well behind its competition technologically. In the mid-'20s, Edison experimented with a 33 rpm long-playing format on Diamond Discs that was a complete and utter disaster. Edison didn't start issuing electrically recorded items until 1926, and finally began to issue lateral cut records in 1927, when the company was on its last legs. The Thomas A. Edison record company closed its doors on March 29, 1929 and not a moment too soon. The following day the stock market crashed, and with it the fortunes of his healthiest competitors were wiped out. Edison died less than two years later, though his signature continued to appear on Ediphone dictation records supplied for office use well into the 1970s. The dictation division of Edison had been sold off, but the new owner was permitted to keep the trademark.

For someone who enjoyed such a long association with recordings, and had such a decisive impact on the industry, relatively few records exist of Edison himself. A cylinder of a "Letter," made in fall of 1888, lay unnoticed in the Edison National Historic Site until discovered by researcher Jerry Fabris in the 1990s; it is the earliest known record of Edison speaking. Another discovery is an undated cylinder known as "Thomas A. Edison Tells a Joke." Edison did make one commercially issued recording, "Lest We Not Forget," a speech on the First World War released by his own company in 1919. He is heard briefly on "Christmas Greetings From the Gang at Orange," a promotional Christmas record made as a giveaway by the Edison Company in 1920. The most famous sound byte of Edison, of him reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb," comes not from a record, but from the audio track of an experimental sound film newsreel made during the celebrations surrounding the 50th anniversary of the invention of the phonograph. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, Rovi

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Thomas Edison

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Thomas Edison
"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." – Thomas Alva Edison, Harper's Monthly (September 1932)
Born	Thomas Alva Edison (1847-02-11)February 11, 1847 Milan, Ohio, U.S.
Died	October 18, 1931(1931-10-18) (aged 84) West Orange, New Jersey, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	School dropout
Occupation	Inventor, businessman
Religion	Deist
Spouse	Mary Stilwell (m. 1871–1884) Mina Miller (m. 1886–1931)
Children	Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965) Thomas Alva Edison Jr. (1876–1935) William Leslie Edison (1878–1937) Madeleine Edison (1888–1979) Charles Edison (1890–1969) Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992)
Parents	Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–1896) Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871)
Relatives	Lewis Miller (father-in-law)
Signature

Edison as a boy

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.^[1]

Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.

His advanced work in these fields was an outgrowth of his early career as a telegraph operator. Edison originated the concept and implementation of electric-power generation and distribution to homes, businesses, and factories – a crucial development in the modern industrialized world. His first power station was on Manhattan Island, New York.

Early life

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–96, born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, Canada) and Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871, born in Chenango County, New York).^[2]^{[citation needed]} His father had to escape from Canada because he took part in the unsuccessful Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837.^{[citation needed]} Edison reported being of Dutch ancestry.^[3]

In school, the young Edison's mind often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him "addled". This ended Edison's three months of official schooling. Edison recalled later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." His mother taught him at home.^[4] Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy and The Cooper Union.

Edison developed hearing problems at an early age. The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections. Around the middle of his career, Edison attributed the hearing impairment to being struck on the ears by a train conductor when his chemical laboratory in a boxcar caught fire and he was thrown off the train in Smiths Creek, Michigan, along with his apparatus and chemicals. In his later years, he modified the story to say the injury occurred when the conductor, in helping him onto a moving train, lifted him by the ears.^[5]^[6]

Edison's family moved to Port Huron, Michigan after the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854 and business declined;^[7] his life there was bittersweet. He sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, and he sold vegetables to supplement his income. He also studied qualitative analysis, and conducted chemical experiments on the train until an accident prohibited further work of the kind.^[8]

He obtained the exclusive right to sell newspapers on the road, and, with the aid of four assistants, he set in type and printed the Grand Trunk Herald, which he sold with his other papers.^[8] This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures, as he discovered his talents as a businessman. These talents eventually led him to found 14 companies, including General Electric, which is still one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.^[9]^[10]

Telegrapher

Edison became a telegraph operator after he saved three-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from being struck by a runaway train. Jimmie's father, station agent J.U. MacKenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he trained Edison as a telegraph operator. Edison's first telegraphy job away from Port Huron was at Stratford Junction, Ontario, on the Grand Trunk Railway.^[11]

In 1866, at the age of 19, Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where, as an employee of Western Union, he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire. Edison requested the night shift, which allowed him plenty of time to spend at his two favorite pastimes—reading and experimenting. Eventually, the latter pre-occupation cost him his job. One night in 1867, he was working with a lead–acid battery when he spilled sulfuric acid onto the floor. It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss's desk below. The next morning Edison was fired.^[12]

One of his mentors during those early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the impoverished youth to live and work in the basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey home. Some of Edison's earliest inventions were related to telegraphy, including a stock ticker. His first patent was for the electric vote recorder, (U.S. Patent 90,646),^[13] which was granted on June 1, 1869.^[14]

Marriages and children

On December 25, 1871, Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell (1855-1884), whom he had met two months earlier; she was an employee at one of his shops. They had three children:

Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965), nicknamed "Dot"^[15]
Thomas Alva Edison, Jr. (1876–1935), nicknamed "Dash"^[16]
William Leslie Edison (1878–1937) Inventor, graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, 1900.^[17]

Mary Edison died at age 29 on August 9, 1884, of unknown causes: possibly from a brain tumor^[18] or a morphine overdose. Doctors frequently prescribed morphine to women in those years to treat a variety of causes, and researchers believe that some of her symptoms sounded as if they were associated with morphine poisoning.^[19]

Mina Edison in 1906

On February 24, 1886, at the age of thirty-nine, Edison married the 20-year-old Mina Miller (1866-1947) in Akron, Ohio.^[20] She was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution and a benefactor of Methodist charities. They also had three children together:

Madeleine Edison (1888–1979), who married John Eyre Sloane.^[21]^[22]
Charles Edison (1890–1969), who took over the company upon his father's death and who later was elected Governor of New Jersey.^[23] He also took charge of his father's experimental laboratories in West Orange.
Theodore Edison (1898–1992), (MIT Physics 1923), credited with more than 80 patents.

Mina outlived Thomas Edison, dying on August 24, 1947.^[24]^[25]

Beginning his career

Photograph of Edison with his phonograph (2nd model), taken in Mathew Brady's Washington, DC studio in April 1878.

	Mary Had a Little Lamb Thomas Edison reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb"
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention that first gained him notice was the phonograph in 1877. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," New Jersey.

His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder, but had poor sound quality and the recordings could be played only a few times. In the 1880s, a redesigned model using wax-coated cardboard cylinders was produced by Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter. This was one reason that Thomas Edison continued work on his own "Perfected Phonograph."

Menlo Park (1876–1881)

Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory, removed to Greenfield Village at Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. (Note the organ against the back wall)

Edison's major innovation was the first industrial research lab, which was built in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was built with the funds from the sale of Edison's quadruplex telegraph. After his demonstration of the telegraph, Edison was not sure that his original plan to sell it for $4,000 to $5,000 was right, so he asked Western Union to make a bid. He was surprised to hear them offer $10,000,^{[citation needed]} ($202,000 USD 2010) which he gratefully accepted.

The quadruplex telegraph was Edison's first big financial success, and Menlo Park became the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement. Edison was legally attributed with most of the inventions produced there, though many employees carried out research and development under his direction. His staff was generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove them hard to produce results.

William Joseph Hammer, a consulting electrical engineer, began his duties as a laboratory assistant to Edison in December 1879. He assisted in experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting, and other developing inventions. However, Hammer worked primarily on the incandescent electric lamp and was put in charge of tests and records on that device. In 1880, he was appointed chief engineer of the Edison Lamp Works. In his first year, the plant under General Manager Francis Robbins Upton turned out 50,000 lamps. According to Edison, Hammer was "a pioneer of incandescent electric lighting".

Thomas Edison's first successful light bulb model, used in public demonstration at Menlo Park, December 1879

Nearly all of Edison's patents were utility patents, which were protected for a 17-year period and included inventions or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or chemical in nature. About a dozen were design patents, which protect an ornamental design for up to a 14-year period. As in most patents, the inventions he described were improvements over prior art. The phonograph patent, in contrast, was unprecedented as describing the first device to record and reproduce sounds.^[26]

Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the first commercially practical incandescent light.^{[citation needed]} Many earlier inventors had previously devised incandescent lamps, including Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans. Others who developed early and commercially impractical incandescent electric lamps included Humphry Davy, James Bowman Lindsay, Moses G. Farmer,^[27] William E. Sawyer, Joseph Swan and Heinrich Göbel. Some of these early bulbs had such flaws as an extremely short life, high expense to produce, and high electric current drawn, making them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially.^[28]

In 1878, Edison applied the term filament to the element of glowing wire carrying the current, although the English inventor Joseph Swan had used the term prior to this. Swan developed an incandescent light with a long lasting filament at about the same time as Edison, as Swan's earlier bulbs lacked the high resistance needed to be an effective part of an electrical utility. Edison and his co-workers set about the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. In Britain, Joseph Swan had been able to obtain a patent on the incandescent lamp; though Edison had already been making successful lamps for some time, his patent application was incompletely prepared and failed.^[28]

Unable to raise the required capital in Britain because of this, Edison was forced to enter into a joint venture with Swan (known as Ediswan). Swan acknowledged that Edison had anticipated him, saying "Edison is entitled to more than I ... he has seen further into this subject, vastly than I, and foreseen and provided for details that I did not comprehend until I saw his system".^[29]

By 1879, Edison had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While the earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions, dating back to a demonstration of a glowing wire by Alessandro Volta in 1800, Edison concentrated on commercial application, and was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs and creating a complete system for the generation and distribution of electricity.

In just over a decade, Edison's Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to occupy two city blocks. Edison said he wanted the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material". A newspaper article printed in 1887 reveals the seriousness of his claim, stating the lab contained "eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels ... silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark's teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell ... cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock's tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores ..." and the list goes on.^[30]

Over his desk, Edison displayed a placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous quotation: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."^[31] This slogan was reputedly posted at several other locations throughout the facility.

With Menlo Park, Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application.

Carbon telephone transmitter

In 1877–78, Edison invented and developed the carbon microphone used in all telephones along with the Bell receiver until the 1980s. After protracted patent litigation, in 1892 a federal court ruled that Edison and not Emile Berliner was the inventor of the carbon microphone. The carbon microphone was also used in radio broadcasting and public address work through the 1920s.

Electric light

Main article: History of the light bulb

Edison in 1878

Building on the contributions of other developers over the previous three quarters of a century, Edison made improvements to the idea of incandescent light, and entered the public consciousness as "the inventor" of the lightbulb, and a prime mover in developing the necessary infrastructure for electric power.

After many experiments with platinum and other metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on October 22, 1879;^[32] it lasted 13.5 hours.^[33] Edison continued to improve this design and by November 4, 1879, filed for U.S. patent 223,898 (granted on January 27, 1880) for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to platina contact wires".^[34]

Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways",^[34] it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered a carbonized bamboo filament that could last over 1,200 hours. The idea of using this particular raw material originated from Edison's recalling his examination of a few threads from a bamboo fishing pole while relaxing on the shore of Battle Lake in the present-day state of Wyoming, where he and other members of a scientific team had traveled so that they could clearly observe a total eclipse of the sun on July 29, 1878, from the Continental Divide.^[35]

U.S. Patent#223898: Electric-Lamp. Issued January 27, 1880.

In 1878, Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan and the members of the Vanderbilt family. Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park. It was during this time that he said: "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."^[36]

Lewis Latimer joined the Edison Electric Light Company in 1884. Latimer had received a patent in January 1881 for the "Process of Manufacturing Carbons", an improved method for the production of carbon filaments for lightbulbs. Latimer worked as an engineer, a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigation on electric lights.^[37]

George Westinghouse's company bought Philip Diehl's competing induction lamp patent rights (1882) for $25,000, forcing the holders of the Edison patent to charge a more reasonable rate for the use of the Edison patent rights and lowering the price of the electric lamp.^[38]

On October 8, 1883, the US patent office ruled that Edison's patent was based on the work of William Sawyer and was therefore invalid. Litigation continued for nearly six years, until October 6, 1889, when a judge ruled that Edison's electric-light improvement claim for "a filament of carbon of high resistance" was valid. To avoid a possible court battle with Joseph Swan, whose British patent had been awarded a year before Edison's, he and Swan formed a joint company called Ediswan to manufacture and market the invention in Britain.

Mahen Theatre in Brno (in what is now the Czech Republic) was the first public building in the world to use Edison's electric lamps, with the installation supervised by Edison's assistant in the invention of the lamp, Francis Jehl.^[39] In September 2010, a sculpture of three giant light bulbs was erected in Brno, in front of the theatre.^[40]

Electric power distribution

Edison patented a system for electricity distribution in 1880, which was essential to capitalize on the invention of the electric lamp. On December 17, 1880, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company. The company established the first investor-owned electric utility in 1882 on Pearl Street Station, New York City. It was on September 4, 1882, that Edison switched on his Pearl Street generating station's electrical power distribution system, which provided 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.^[41]

Earlier in the year, in January 1882, he had switched on the first steam-generating power station at Holborn Viaduct in London. The DC supply system provided electricity supplies to street lamps and several private dwellings within a short distance of the station. On January 19, 1883, the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system employing overhead wires began service in Roselle, New Jersey.

War of currents

Main article: War of Currents

Extravagant displays of electric lights quickly became a feature of public events, as in this picture from the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition.

Edison's true success, like that of his friend Henry Ford, was in his ability to maximize profits through establishment of mass-production systems and intellectual property rights. George Westinghouse and Edison became adversaries because of Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution instead of the more easily transmitted alternating current (AC) system invented by Nikola Tesla and promoted by Westinghouse. Unlike DC, AC could be stepped up to very high voltages with transformers, sent over thinner and cheaper wires, and stepped down again at the destination for distribution to users.

In 1887, there were 121 Edison power stations in the United States delivering DC electricity to customers. When the limitations of DC were discussed by the public, Edison launched a propaganda campaign to convince people that AC was far too dangerous to use. The problem with DC was that the power plants could economically deliver DC electricity only to customers within about one and a half miles (about 2.4 km) from the generating station, so that it was suitable only for central business districts. When George Westinghouse suggested using high-voltage AC instead, as it could carry electricity hundreds of miles with marginal loss of power, Edison waged a "War of Currents" to prevent AC from being adopted.

The war against AC led him to become involved in the development and promotion of the electric chair (using AC) as an attempt to portray AC to have greater lethal potential than DC. Edison went on to carry out a brief but intense campaign to ban the use of AC or to limit the allowable voltage for safety purposes. As part of this campaign, Edison's employees publicly electrocuted animals to demonstrate the dangers of AC;^[42]^[43] alternating electric currents are slightly more dangerous in that frequencies near 60 Hz have a markedly greater potential for inducing fatal "cardiac fibrillation" than do direct currents.^[44] On one of the more notable occasions, in 1903, Edison's workers electrocuted Topsy the elephant at Luna Park, near Coney Island, after she had killed several men and her owners wanted her put to death.^[45] His company filmed the electrocution.

AC replaced DC in most instances of generation and power distribution, enormously extending the range and improving the efficiency of power distribution. Though widespread use of DC ultimately lost favor for distribution, it exists today primarily in long-distance high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems. Low-voltage DC distribution continued to be used in high-density downtown areas for many years but was eventually replaced by AC low-voltage network distribution in many of them.^[46]

DC had the advantage that large battery banks could maintain continuous power through brief interruptions of the electric supply from generators and the transmission system. Utilities such as Commonwealth Edison in Chicago had rotary converters or motor-generator sets, which could change DC to AC and AC to various frequencies in the early to mid-20th century. Utilities supplied rectifiers to convert the low voltage AC to DC for such DC loads as elevators, fans and pumps. There were still 1,600 DC customers in downtown New York City as of 2005, and service was finally discontinued only on November 14, 2007.^[46] Most subway systems are still powered by direct current.

Fluoroscopy

Edison is credited with designing and producing the first commercially available fluoroscope, a machine that uses X-rays to take radiographs. Until Edison discovered that calcium tungstate fluoroscopy screens produced brighter images than the barium platinocyanide screens originally used by Wilhelm Röntgen, the technology was capable of producing only very faint images.

The fundamental design of Edison's fluoroscope is still in use today, although Edison himself abandoned the project after nearly losing his own eyesight and seriously injuring his assistant, Clarence Dally. Dally had made himself an enthusiastic human guinea pig for the fluoroscopy project and in the process been exposed to a poisonous dose of radiation. He later died of injuries related to the exposure. In 1903, a shaken Edison said "Don't talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them."^[47]

Work relations

Photograph of Thomas Edison by Victor Daireaux, Paris, circa 1880s

Frank J. Sprague, a competent mathematician and former naval officer, was recruited by Edward H. Johnson and joined the Edison organization in 1883. One of Sprague's contributions to the Edison Laboratory at Menlo Park was to expand Edison's mathematical methods. Despite the common belief that Edison did not use mathematics, analysis of his notebooks reveal that he was an astute user of mathematical analysis conducted by his assistants such as Francis Robbins Upton, for example, determining the critical parameters of his electric lighting system including lamp resistance by an analysis of Ohm's Law, Joule's Law and economics.^[48]

Another of Edison's assistants was Nikola Tesla. Tesla claimed that Edison had promised him $50,000 if he succeeded in making improvements to his DC generation plants. Several months later, when Tesla had finished the work and asked to be paid, he said that Edison replied, "When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke."^[49]

Tesla immediately resigned. With Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the payment would have amounted to over 53 years' pay and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Another account states that Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week.^[50]

Although Tesla accepted an Edison Medal later in life, this and other negative events concerning Edison remained with him. The day after Edison died, the New York Times contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion coming from Tesla who was quoted as saying:

He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. [...] His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90% of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense.^[51]

—Nikola Tesla

One of Edison's famous quotations about his attempts to make the light globe suggest that perhaps Tesla was right about Edison's methods of working: "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."^[52]

When Edison was a very old man and close to death, he said, in looking back, that the biggest mistake he had made was in not respecting Tesla or his work.^[53]

There were 28 men recognized as Edison Pioneers.

Media inventions

The key to Edison's fortunes was telegraphy. With knowledge gained from years of working as a telegraph operator, he learned the basics of electricity. This allowed him to make his early fortune with the stock ticker, the first electricity-based broadcast system. Edison patented the sound recording and reproducing phonograph in 1878. Edison was also granted a patent for the motion picture camera or "Kinetograph". He did the electromechanical design, while his employee W.K.L. Dickson, a photographer, worked on the photographic and optical development. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson.^[32] In 1891, Thomas Edison built a Kinetoscope, or peep-hole viewer. This device was installed in penny arcades, where people could watch short, simple films. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both first publicly exhibited May 20, 1891.^[54]

On August 9, 1892, Edison received a patent for a two-way telegraph. In April 1896, Thomas Armat's Vitascope, manufactured by the Edison factory and marketed in Edison's name, was used to project motion pictures in public screenings in New York City. Later he exhibited motion pictures with voice soundtrack on cylinder recordings, mechanically synchronized with the film.

The June 1894 Leonard–Cushing bout. Each of the six one-minute rounds recorded by the Kinetoscope was made available to exhibitors for $22.50.^[55] Customers who watched the final round saw Leonard score a knockdown.

Officially the kinetoscope entered Europe when the rich American Businessman Irving T. Bush (1869–1948) bought from the Continental Commerce Company of Frank Z. Maguire and Joseph D. Baucus a dozen machines. Bush placed from October 17, 1894, the first kinetoscopes in London. At the same time the French company Kinétoscope Edison Michel et Alexis Werner bought these machines for the market in France. In the last three months of 1894, The Continental Commerce Company sold hundreds of kinetoscopes in Europe (i.e. the Netherlands and Italy). In Germany and in Austria-Hungary the kinetoscope was introduced by the Deutsche-österreichische-Edison-Kinetoscop Gesellschaft, founded by the Ludwig Stollwerck^[56] of the Schokoladen-Süsswarenfabrik Stollwerck & Co of Cologne.

The first kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at the Fairs in early 1895. The Edison's Kinétoscope Français, a Belgian company, was founded in Brussels on January 15, 1895, with the rights to sell the kinetoscopes in Monaco, France and the French colonies. The main investors in this company were Belgian industrialists.^[57]

On May 14, 1895, the Edison's Kinétoscope Belge was founded in Brussels. The businessman Ladislas-Victor Lewitzki, living in London but active in Belgium and France, took the initiative in starting this business. He had contacts with Leon Gaumont and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. In 1898 he also became a shareholder of the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for France.^[57]

In 1901, he visited the Sudbury area in Ontario, Canada, as a mining prospector, and is credited with the original discovery of the Falconbridge ore body. His attempts to mine the ore body were not successful, however, and he abandoned his mining claim in 1903.^[58] A street in Falconbridge, as well as the Edison Building, which served as the head office of Falconbridge Mines, are named for him.

In 1902, agents of Thomas Edison bribed a theater owner in London for a copy of A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès. Edison then made hundreds of copies and showed them in New York City. Méliès received no compensation. He was counting on taking the film to the US and recapture its huge cost by showing it throughout the country when he realized it had already been shown there by Edison. This effectively bankrupted Méliès.^[59]

Other exhibitors similarly routinely copied and exhibited each others' films.^[60] To better protect the copyrights on his films, Edison deposited prints of them on long strips of photographic paper with the U.S. copyright office. Many of these paper prints survived longer and in better condition than the actual films of that era.^[61]

Edison's favorite movie was The Birth of a Nation. He thought that talkies had "spoiled everything" for him. "There isn't any good acting on the screen. They concentrate on the voice now and have forgotten how to act. I can sense it more than you because I am deaf."^[62] His favorite stars were Mary Pickford and Clara Bow.^[63]

In 1908, Edison started the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios (commonly known as the Edison Trust). Thomas Edison was the first honorary fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, which was founded in 1929.

West Orange and Fort Myers (1886–1931)

Thomas A. Edison Industries Exhibit, Primary Battery section, 1915

Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone, respectively. Ft. Myers, Florida, February 11, 1929

Edison moved from Menlo Park after the death of Mary Stilwell and purchased a home known as "Glenmont" in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey. In 1885, Thomas Edison bought property in Fort Myers, Florida, and built what was later called Seminole Lodge as a winter retreat. Edison and his wife Mina spent many winters in Fort Myers where they recreated and Edison tried to find a domestic source of natural rubber.

Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, later lived a few hundred feet away from Edison at his winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida. Edison even contributed technology to the automobile. They were friends until Edison's death.

In 1928, Edison joined the Fort Myers Civitan Club. He believed strongly in the organization, writing that "The Civitan Club is doing things—big things—for the community, state, and nation, and I certainly consider it an honor to be numbered in its ranks."^[64] He was an active member in the club until his death, sometimes bringing Henry Ford to the club's meetings.

The final years

Edison was active in business right up to the end. Just months before his death in 1931, the Lackawanna Railroad implemented electric trains in suburban service from Hoboken to Gladstone, Montclair and Dover in New Jersey. Transmission was by means of an overhead catenary system, with the entire project under Edison's guidance. To the surprise of many, he was at the throttle of the very first MU (Multiple-Unit) train to depart Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, driving the train all the way to Dover.^[65]

As another tribute to his lasting legacy, the same fleet of cars Edison deployed on the Lackawanna in 1931 served commuters until their retirement in 1984, when some of them were purchased by the Berkshire Scenic Railway Museum in Lenox, Massachusetts. A special plaque commemorating the joint achievement of both the railway and Edison can be seen today in the waiting room of Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, presently operated by New Jersey Transit.^[65]

Edison was said to have been influenced by a popular fad diet in his last few years; "the only liquid he consumed was a pint of milk every three hours".^[32] He is reported to have believed this diet would restore his health. However, this tale is doubtful. In 1930, the year before Edison died, Mina said in an interview about him, "correct eating is one of his greatest hobbies." She also said that during one of his periodic "great scientific adventures", Edison would be up at 7:00, have breakfast at 8:00, and be rarely home for lunch or dinner, implying that he continued to have all three.^[62]

Edison became the owner of his Milan, Ohio, birthplace in 1906. On his last visit, in 1923, he was shocked to find his old home still lit by lamps and candles.

Thomas Edison died of complications of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, "Glenmont" in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, which he had purchased in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina. He is buried behind the home.^[66]^[67]

Edison's last breath is reportedly contained in a test tube at the Henry Ford Museum. Ford reportedly convinced Charles Edison to seal a test tube of air in the inventor's room shortly after his death, as a memento. A plaster death mask was also made.^[68]

Mina died in 1947.

Views on politics, religion and metaphysics

Historian Paul Israel has characterized Edison as a "freethinker".^[32] Edison was heavily influenced by Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason.^[32] Edison defended Paine's "scientific deism", saying, "He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity."^[32] In an October 2, 1910, interview in the New York Times Magazine, Edison stated:

Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.^[69]

Edison was called an atheist for those remarks, and although he did not allow himself to be drawn into the controversy publicly, he clarified himself in a private letter: "You have misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made."^[32]

Nonviolence was key to Edison's moral views, and when asked to serve as a naval consultant for World War I, he specified he would work only on defensive weapons and later noted, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill." Edison's philosophy of nonviolence extended to animals as well, about which he stated: "Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."^[70] However, he is also notorious for having electrocuted a number of dogs in 1888, both by direct and alternating current, in an attempt to argue that the former (which he had a vested business interest in promoting) was safer than the latter (favored by his rival George Westinghouse).^[71]

Edison's success in promoting direct current as less lethal also led to alternating current being used in the electric chair adopted by New York in 1889 as a supposedly humane execution method. Because Westinghouse was angered by the decision, he funded Eighth Amendment-based appeals for inmates set to die in the electric chair, ultimately resulting in Edison providing the generators which powered early electrocutions and testifying successfully on behalf of the state that electrocution was a painless method of execution.^[72]

Tributes

Places and people named for Edison

Several places have been named after Edison, most notably the town of Edison, New Jersey. Thomas Edison State College, a nationally known college for adult learners, is in Trenton, New Jersey. Two community colleges are named for him: Edison State College in Fort Myers, Florida, and Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio.^[73] There are numerous high schools named after Edison; see Edison High School.

In 1883, the City Hotel in Sunbury, Pennsylvania was the first building to be lit with Edison's three-wire system. The hotel was renamed The Hotel Edison upon Edison's return to the City on 1922. ^[74]

Edison was on hand to turn on the lights at the Hotel Edison in New York City when it opened in 1931.

Three bridges around the United States have been named in his honor (see Edison Bridge).

In space, his name is commemorated in asteroid 742 Edisona.

The Russian composer Edison Denisov, whose father was a radio-physicist, was named after the inventor.

Museums and memorials

Statue of young Thomas Edison by the railroad tracks in Port Huron, Michigan.

In West Orange, New Jersey, the 13.5 acre (5.5 ha) Glenmont estate is maintained and operated by the National Park Service as the Edison National Historic Site.^[75] The Thomas Alva Edison Memorial Tower and Museum is in the town of Edison, New Jersey.^[76] In Beaumont, Texas, there is an Edison Museum, though Edison never visited there.^{[citation needed]}

The Port Huron Museum, in Port Huron, Michigan, restored the original depot that Thomas Edison worked out of as a young newsbutcher. The depot has been named the Thomas Edison Depot Museum.^[77] The town has many Edison historical landmarks, including the graves of Edison's parents, and a monument along the St. Clair River. Edison's influence can be seen throughout this city of 32,000.

In Detroit, the Edison Memorial Fountain in Grand Circus Park was created to honor his achievements. The limestone fountain was dedicated October 21, 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the lightbulb.^[78] On the same night, The Edison Institute was dedicated in nearby Dearborn.

In early 2010, Edison was proposed by the Ohio Historical Society as a finalist in a statewide vote for inclusion in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol.

Companies bearing Edison's name

In 1915

Edison General Electric, merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric
Commonwealth Edison, now part of Exelon
Consolidated Edison
Edison International
- Southern California Edison
- Edison Mission Energy
- Edison Capital
Detroit Edison, a unit of DTE Energy
Edison Sault Electric Company, a unit of Wisconsin Energy Corporation
FirstEnergy
- Metropolitan Edison
- Ohio Edison
- Toledo Edison
Edison S.p.A., a unit of Italenergia
Boston Edison, a unit of NSTAR, formerly known as the Edison Electric Illuminating Company
WEEI radio station in Boston, established by the Edison Electric Illuminating Company (hence the call letters)
Trade association the Edison Electric Institute, a lobbying and research group for investor-owned utilities in the United States
Edison Ore-Milling Company
Edison Portland Cement Company

Awards named in honor of Edison

The Edison Medal was created on February 11, 1904, by a group of Edison's friends and associates. Four years later the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), later IEEE, entered into an agreement with the group to present the medal as its highest award. The first medal was presented in 1909 to Elihu Thomson and, in a twist of fate, was awarded to Nikola Tesla in 1917. It is the oldest award in the area of electrical and electronics engineering, and is presented annually "for a career of meritorious achievement in electrical science, electrical engineering or the electrical arts."

In the Netherlands, the major music awards are named the Edison Award after him.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers concedes the Thomas A. Edison Patent Award to individual patents since 2000.^[79]

Honors and awards given to Edison

The President of the Third French Republic, Jules Grévy, on the recommendation of his Minister of Foreign Affairs Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire and with the presentations of the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs Louis Cochery, designated Edison with the distinction of an 'Officer of the Legion of Honour' (Légion d'honneur) by decree on November 10, 1881;^[80] He also named a Chevalier in 1879, and a Commander in 1889.^[81]

In 1887, Edison won the Matteucci Medal. In 1890, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The Philadelphia City Council named Edison the recipient of the John Scott Medal in 1889.^[81]

In 1899, Edison was awarded the Edward Longstreth Medal of The Franklin Institute.^[82]

He was named an Honorable Consulting Engineer at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World's fair in 1904.^[81]

In 1908, Edison received the American Association of Engineering Societies John Fritz Medal.^[81]

Edison was awarded Franklin Medal of The Franklin Institute in 1915 for discoveries contributing to the foundation of industries and the well-being of the human race.

The United States Navy department awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal in 1920.^[81]

The American Institute of Electrical Engineers created the Edison Medal in 1923 and he was its first recipient.^[81]

In 1927, he was granted membership in the National Academy of Sciences.^[81]

On May 29, 1928, Edison received the Congressional Gold Medal.^[81]

In 1983, the United States Congress, pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 140 (Public Law 97—198), designated February 11, Edison's birthday, as National Inventor's Day.

Edison was ranked thirty-fifth on Michael H. Hart's 1978 book The 100, a list of the most influential figures in history. Life magazine (USA), in a special double issue in 1997, placed Edison first in the list of the "100 Most Important People in the Last 1000 Years", noting that the light bulb he promoted "lit up the world". In the 2005 television series The Greatest American, he was voted by viewers as the fifteenth-greatest.

In 2008, Edison was inducted in the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

In 2010, Edison was honored with a Technical Grammy Award.

In 2011, Edison was inducted into the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame, and named a Great Floridian by the Florida Governor and Cabinet.^[83]

On November 6, 1915, The New York Times announced that both Edison and Tesla were to jointly receive the 1915 Nobel Prize but it did not occur.^[84] The details of what happened are not known but Tesla who had once worked for Edison quit when he was promised a large bonus for solving a problem and then after being successful was told the promise was a joke.^[85] Tesla once said that if Edison had to find a needle in a haystack he would take apart the haystack one straw at a time.^[86] The Prize was awarded to Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays".

Other items named after Edison

The United States Navy named the USS Edison (DD-439), a Gleaves class destroyer, in his honor in 1940. The ship was decommissioned a few months after the end of World War II. In 1962, the Navy commissioned USS Thomas A. Edison (SSBN-610), a fleet ballistic missile nuclear-powered submarine.

Decommissioned on December 1, 1983, Thomas A. Edison was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on April 30, 1986. She went through the Navy's Nuclear Powered Ship and Submarine Recycling Program at Bremerton, Washington, beginning on October 1, 1996. When she finished the program on December 1, 1997, she ceased to exist as a complete ship and was listed as scrapped.

In popular culture

Main article: Thomas Edison in popular culture

Thomas Edison has appeared in popular culture as a character in novels, films, comics and video games. His prolific inventing helped make him an icon and he has made appearances in popular culture during his lifetime down to the present day. His history with Nikola Tesla has also provided dramatic tension and is a theme returned to numerous times.

On February 11, 2011, on Thomas Edison's 164th birthday, Google's homepage featured an animated Google Doodle commemorating his many inventions. When the cursor was hovered over the doodle, a series of mechanisms seemed to move, causing a lightbulb to glow.^[87]

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^ Benoit, Tod (2003). Where are they buried? How did they die?. Black Dog & Leventhal. p. 560. ISBN 978-1-57912-678-0.
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^ ""No Immortality of the Soul" says Thomas A. Edison. In Fact, He Doesn't Believe There Is a Soul — Human Beings Only an Aggregate of Cells and the Brain Only a Wonderful Machine, Says Wizard of Electricity". New York Times. October 2, 1910, Sunday. "Thomas A. Edison in the following interview for the first time speaks to the public on the vital subjects of the human soul and immortality. It will be bound to be a most fascinating, an amazing statement, from one of the most notable and interesting men of the age ... Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions."
^ Cited in Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America's Greatest Inventor by Sarah Miller Caldicott, Michael J. Gelb, page 37.
^ Jonnes
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^ NNDB online website. The same decree awarded German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz with the designation of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, as well as Alexander Graham Bell. The decree preamble cited "for services provided to the Congress and to the International Electrical Exhibition"
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Bibliography

Albion, Michele Wehrwein. (2008). The Florida Life of Thomas Edison. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0-8130-3259-7.
Adams, Glen J. (2004). The Search for Thomas Edison's Boyhood Home. ISBN 978-1-4116-1361-4.
Angel, Ernst (1926). Edison. Sein Leben und Erfinden. Berlin: Ernst Angel Verlag.
Baldwin, Neil (2001). Edison: Inventing the Century. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-03571-0.
Clark, Ronald William (1977). Edison: The man who made the future. London: Macdonald & Jane's: Macdonald and Jane's. ISBN 978-0-354-04093-8.
Conot, Robert (1979). A Streak of Luck. New York: Seaview Books. ISBN 978-0-87223-521-2.
Davis, L. J. (1998). Fleet Fire: Thomas Edison and the Pioneers of the Electric Revolution. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-47927-1.
Essig, Mark (2004). Edison and the Electric Chair. Stroud: Sutton. ISBN 978-0-7509-3680-4.
Essig, Mark (2003). Edison & the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death. New York: Walker & Company. ISBN 978-0-8027-1406-0.
Israel, Paul (1998). Edison: a Life of Invention. New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-52942-2.
Jonnes, Jill (2003). Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-50739-7.
Josephson, Matthew (1959). Edison. McGraw Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-033046-7.
Koenigsberg, Allen (1987). Edison Cylinder Records, 1889-1912. APM Press. ISBN 0-937612-07-3.
Pretzer, William S. (ed). (1989). Working at Inventing: Thomas A. Edison and the Menlo Park Experience. Dearborn, Michigan: Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village. ISBN 978-0-933728-33-2.
Stross, Randall E. (2007). The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. Crown. ISBN 1-4000-4762-5.

External links

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Locations

Information and media

Thomas Edison on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
The Diary of Thomas Edison
Works by Thomas Edison at Project Gutenberg
Edison's patent application for the light bulb at the National Archives.
Thomas Edison at the Internet Movie Database
Jan. 4, 1903: Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point – Wired article about Edison's "macabre form of a series of animal electrocutions using AC."
The Invention Factory: Thomas Edison's Laboratories
Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin' at Project Gutenberg
The short film "Story of Thomas Alva Edison" is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
Rutgers: Edison Papers
Edisonian Museum Antique Electrics
"Edison's Miracle of Light"
Edison Innovation Foundation – Non-profit foundation supporting the legacy of Thomas Edison.
Thomas Alva Edison at Find a Grave
The Illustrious Vagabonds
"The World's Greatest Inventor", October 1931, Popular Mechanics detailed, illustrated article
14 minutes "instructional" film with fictional elements The boyhood of Thomas Edison from 1964, produced by Coronet, published by archive.org
Booknotes interview with Neil Baldwin on Edison: Inventing the Century, March 19, 1995.
Booknotes interview with Jill Jonnes on Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World, October 26, 2003.

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Leon Trotsky	*Cover of Time* magazine**	Succeeded by Richard Swann Lull

General Electric

Subsidiaries and divisions

Current	GE Capital GE Capital Aviation Services GE Commercial Finance GE Energy Financial Services GE Money GE Capital Rail Services GE Capital Rail Services (Europe) Trailer Fleet Services GE Technology Infrastructure GE Aviation GE Aviation Systems GE Healthcare GE Transportation GE Energy GE Digital Energy GE Jenbacher GE Measurement & Control Solutions GE Oil & Gas GE Power & Water GE Wind Energy GE Home & Business Solutions GE Consumer & Industrial GE Intelligent Platforms GE Global Research

Former and defunct	Australian Guarantee Corporation¹ Canadian General Electric¹ Electric Bond and Share Company² GE Americom² GE Aerospace² GE Betz¹ GE Capital IT Solutions² GECIS² GE Equipment Services¹ GE Industrial¹ GE Infrastructure¹ GEIS² Genesis Lease² GE Security² Genworth Financial² Montgomery Ward² Tungsram¹ Whatman¹

Joint ventures and shareholdings

Products, services and brands

People

Founders	Thomas Edison Edwin J. Houston Elihu Thomson

Other	James Cash, Jr. Ann Fudge Susan Hockfield Jeffrey Immelt Andrea Jung Alan Lafley Rochelle Lazarus Sam Nunn Roger Penske Douglas A. Warner III Jack Welch Bob Wright

Places and facilities

Other

¹Now integrated into other GE divisions or business groupings
²Sold

Category
Commons

Telecommunications (general)

v t e Telecommunications in Africa

Sovereign states	Algeria Angola Benin Botswana Burkina Faso Burundi Cameroon Cape Verde Central African Republic Chad Comoros Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) Djibouti Egypt Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Ethiopia Gabon The Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea-Bissau Kenya Lesotho Liberia Libya Madagascar Malawi Mali Mauritania Mauritius Morocco Mozambique Namibia Niger Nigeria Rwanda São Tomé and Príncipe Senegal Seychelles Sierra Leone Somalia South Africa South Sudan Sudan Swaziland Tanzania Togo Tunisia Uganda Zambia Zimbabwe

States with limited recognition	Azawad Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic Somaliland

Dependencies and other territories	Canary Islands / Ceuta / Melilla / Plazas de soberanía (Spain) Madeira (Portugal) Mayotte / Réunion (France) Saint Helena / Ascension Island / Tristan da Cunha (United Kingdom) Western Sahara

v t e Telecommunications in Asia

Sovereign states	Afghanistan Armenia Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Bhutan Brunei Burma (Myanmar) Cambodia People's Republic of China Cyprus East Timor (Timor-Leste) Egypt Georgia India Indonesia Iran Iraq Israel Japan Jordan Kazakhstan North Korea South Korea Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Lebanon Malaysia Maldives Mongolia Nepal Oman Pakistan Philippines Qatar Russia Saudi Arabia Singapore Sri Lanka Syria Tajikistan Thailand Turkey Turkmenistan United Arab Emirates Uzbekistan Vietnam Yemen

States with limited recognition	Abkhazia Nagorno-Karabakh Northern Cyprus Palestine Republic of China (Taiwan) South Ossetia

Dependencies and other territories	British Indian Ocean Territory Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Hong Kong Macau

v t e Telecommunications in Europe

Sovereign states	Albania Andorra Armenia Austria Azerbaijan Belarus Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kazakhstan Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Malta Moldova Monaco Montenegro Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom England Northern Ireland Scotland Wales

States with limited recognition	Abkhazia Kosovo Nagorno-Karabakh Northern Cyprus South Ossetia Transnistria

Dependencies and other territories	Åland Faroe Islands Gibraltar Guernsey Jersey Isle of Man Svalbard

Other entities	European Union

v t e Telecommunications in North America

Sovereign states	Antigua and Barbuda Bahamas Barbados Belize Canada Costa Rica Cuba Dominica Dominican Republic El Salvador Grenada Guatemala Haiti Honduras Jamaica Mexico Nicaragua Panama Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Trinidad and Tobago United States

Dependencies and other territories	Anguilla Aruba Bermuda Bonaire British Virgin Islands Cayman Islands Curaçao Greenland Guadeloupe Martinique Montserrat Navassa Island Puerto Rico Saint Barthélemy Saint Martin Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saba Sint Eustatius Sint Maarten Turks and Caicos Islands United States Virgin Islands

v t e Telecommunications in Oceania

Sovereign states	Australia East Timor (Timor-Leste) Fiji Indonesia Kiribati Marshall Islands Federated States of Micronesia Nauru New Zealand Palau Papua New Guinea Samoa Solomon Islands Tonga Tuvalu Vanuatu

Dependencies and other territories	American Samoa Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Cook Islands Easter Island French Polynesia Guam Hawaii New Caledonia Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Pitcairn Islands Tokelau Wallis and Futuna

v t e Telecommunications in South America

Sovereign states	Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Guyana Paraguay Peru Suriname Uruguay Venezuela

Dependencies and other territories	Aruba Bonaire Curaçao Falkland Islands French Guiana South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands

Authority control: LCCN: n80126308 | WorldCat

Persondata
Name	Edison, Thomas Alva
Alternative names
Short description	American inventor and businessman
Date of birth	February 11, 1847
Place of birth	Milan, Ohio, United States
Date of death	October 18, 1931
Place of death	West Orange, New Jersey, United States

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	Tom Edison: The Making of an American Legend (History Film)
	Menlo Park
	Edison

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